So, wait, they're bad because they recommend a product you don't like for an audience you don't identify with, and don't recommend your OS of choice.
Just because you think Linux/Mac should be mentioned in glowing praise next to every mention of Vista doesn't make it so. The point of Consumer Reports is to review things, not advertise the competitors to those things.
Jesus, I wish people would do this for Steve Ballmer chair jokes... and pretty much any other joke that is funny the first few times but gets REALLY FUCKING OLD after more than that.
Maybe then we might see some funnies, rather than "CHUCK NORRISS STOPP TIEM"/"STEVE BALLMER FROW CHAYER"/"CAN I HASS SHIT JOEK NOW" all the friggin time.
The difference with Vista is that the KDE team really has some major interesting new technologies now, though most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.
KDE aims for a Windows-ish philosophy of "everything should be configurable". There are options for just about everything, so you can tweak your desktop to be just the way you want it. This can be intimidating for newbies, but then KDE can also be configured to be very newbie friendly, and indeed many distros already do configure it that way.
GNOME, on the other hand, aims for a Mac OS X philosophy of only presenting to the user what they really need to use to get the job done, with some options hidden and others nonexistant. This is designed to be easy for just about anyone to pick up easily (probably why the Ubuntu team chose it) but it absolutely sucks for configurability.
To summarise: KDE is for end users but can be for power users, GNOME is aimed specifically at end users and noone but.
I know. And it doesn't have to be this way - my post was a general observation. But I find it hilarious to see Slashdotters using one of the biggest debasements and tragedies of our time as a method of having a pop at the Zune. It's OK, they say, the kids will strop. Bullshit.
The point is that the shitty "women waving their arses around" format of music videos (especially dance ones, I've noticed) which is rehashed once about every 40 seconds is reused so often that I'm beginning to get bored of scantily clad women. Which is, as I'm sure you can agree, at least a double edged sword.
Sorta. After a quick google, seems like it's a corporate messaging thing, and since I use Microsoft Messenger (MS' pisspoor hybrid corporate/personal client for the Mac) it might have singled me out. Never know.:/
yeah I know you can use a gmail email as a passport.net (or whatever it is) account and use that with messenger,
Not any more. Before I used msn@joe-baldwin.net or somesuch, but one day I got a message at sign in telling me I had to either get a Hotmail account or change my Passport to something under the messengeruser.com domain (e.g. joebaldwin@messengeruser.com is the one i picked).
I suppose it makes sense; it allows me to give out my MSN information in places that are obscenely public (like, oh, say, Slashdot) and not worry about 12 trillion spam messages.;)
Most of their customers probably already use gmail, so why continue offering the service?
At least among the technically inexperienced, Gmail usage isn't all that high in the UK. Even looking at my college IT class, most of whom were geeks of some description, it was mostly Hotmail or Yahoo.
Of course this is anecdotal evidence, but still...
Maybe I should rephrase my original point. Bush is a disgusting, dictatorial, insane, imperialist cunt with frankly idiotic policies and barely enough sense to flip burgers for minimum wage.
The rest of us just want to pay a fair price, which basically means premium price for new/popular stuff, and a lot less for everything else. You know, how the market works.
I'm sorry, was that your argument? Dear me, it appears to have died in a heap. Wow, Led Zeppelin for a fiver a pop. Boy am I angry that I got mine for seven quid a pop. Oh look, are those albums from less than a year ago? My god, I think they are!
And before you say: no, allofmp3's prices were not fair prices. Not in the slightest.
Well except for one small flaw (I know slashdot has a short attention span). This forum is always going on about the "new and improved" business model's triumph over the "old and busted" model. However I'm not seeing a corresponding rise in the uptake of this "new and improved" model, but simply more consumption of what the "old and busted" model has already produced regardless of the source.
That's by design. That's what the much-touted "new and improved" model means; the same stuff for no cost, because musicians and those who bankroll, market and support them shouldn't be paid for copies of their music. That's pretty much it.
I would probably have more respect for these people if they'd just admit they're being cheap. But as it is they wrap it in the flag and pretend they're either doing a service or it's the way of the future.
I find my card (Capital One Visa, i.e. "you have no credit history, here's one for you", with a £100 limit) to be quite handy. I can pay off the whole bill three times over each month without suffering too much, and if I'm REALLY desperate for cash I can handle the withdrawal fees (you pay for the convenience I suppose).
I would disagree with the part about not buying something if you can't pay it off; that only becomes a trap when you're intent on making the minimum payment rather than paying off as much of the balance as you can reasonably afford each month. If you do the latter, you'll be alright, and it's where credit cards come into their own (i.e. short term credit).
Yes, a lovely ideal except that a) musicians already can ignore the record companies and follow your business model if they so desire, but b) lots of them patently don't want to and c) the ones who do have mostly not become massively popular with "great musicians flourishing" as you put it; the ones that do get successful (Kate Nash and the Arctic Monkeys spring readily to mind) generally get that great success after signing with a record label.
This business model also doesn't work because it relies totally on the public's personal honesty and willingness to travel possibly hundreds of miles to visit a gig by a small band and buy merchandise, both of which are in doubt (especially the first). And even then, after putting on gigs etc, it's entirely possible that the band may never break even (guitars, amps, keyboards etc aren't free).
In fact, this whole problem, the fact that most music fans are not going to travel miles away to pay to see a gig to either see a band they like play their songs once or see a band they've never seen who might well be crap, is the sort of thing the sale of recorded music is intended to solve. Which you conveniently forget.
So yeah, lovely plan, except for the part where it's all bollocks and might well actually reduce the diversity of music on offer. Good try, though.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck when it comes to prosecuting even enough people for breaking your paid and bought for laws.
You mean standard copyright law, right? That was hardly bought and paid for (the extensions, maybe, but then I'll bet that the amount of piracy of recent music is huge.)
Radiohead is really the first band I know of that is trying something different in this space.
And like I mentioned, they may well only have made any money at all by virtue of the fact that they were already a huge band with legions of fans. If they were unknown, they might have barely broken even.
There is like 1 good song on average album and all the other songs are just filler crap.
I dunno. I like all my CDs (I have about 200), none of them have any filler. Maybe the typical Britney-lite album has that sure, but...
I bet that majority of those downloads were done for or by someone with an IQ of 75 or something like that!
That still means that someone thinks the music is good, or at least good enough. Not everyone is into Porcupine Tree, not everyone is into Britney, not everyone is into Swedish Nazi death metal, not everyone is into etc etc etc etc ad infinitum. The fact that you don't like Britney Spears doesn't mean that all those downloads somehow become worthless; they were still done, and most likely a large portion of them were done by someone looking to avoid paying for the album.
More to the point, the fact that almost every album is available for free via illegal means makes it impossible to base a value judgement about a particular album/artist in this context. All the people downloading the Britney album of my example could have downloaded Fear of a Blank Planet with roughly the same amount of expenditure and effort, but didn't.
Only you seem to be focusing on deriding the people who don't pay directly for their copies of music (according to our brief custom of the last 70 years).
I do focus on them, because by and large their lack of payment is based on pure selfishness rather than any overriding moral conscience. If anything, the lack of money going into the system may well stifle artist development; while MySpace, Peoplesound and other such music sharing sites may provide promotion, they cannot match the marketing or distribution clout of the labels. Small bands seeking fame or wishing to have their music heard by a wider audience than the few people who may happen upon their MySpace page may well fail in that goal if they end up with no practical assistance, assistance that labels (both independent and major) have a role in giving.
Why is it so hard to see that its ok to let companies with no practical business model die off?
The record labels HAVE a practical business model, which is funding and promoting artists and then collecting royalties on the records sold as payment. That lots of people selfishly choose to circumvent the payment bit of this model doesn't render it any less practical or feasible.
It seems particularly hard for people of the last couple generations to fathom that music (or art in general) can be created without being paid for copies of their work.
I can fathom that, but I consider it to be the artist's choice to release their work for free or not. If the artist chooses to sign with a record label, they've made it fairly clear that they wish to be paid for making their music. Moreover, there is plenty of music which is available for free, legally, with no commercial interference; and yet a huge part of these discussions on Slashdot is discussing precisely how people can and should carry on illegaly obtaining music produced, funded and sold by corporations they claim to despise and consider a relic.
Even if you don't want to or can't believe this old school view of art, you will face the reality of digital technology. Copying is only going to get faster and more convenient. Distributed technology will only get more robust. Controlling the location of 1s and 0s will become increasingly futile.
So everyone involved should just give up? They should just succumb to the cries of hordes of selfish downloaders, throw themselves to the mercy of the crowds and say "take it! take it all! We'll never be able to stop you! We'll go out of business to support your selfishness!" Bullshit.
Still, every time they yell thief I feel more like Robin Hood, and I'm not the only one.
Robin Hood didn't steal for his own personal gain. You're just being cheap by taking something that you would usually have to pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
So, wait, they're bad because they recommend a product you don't like for an audience you don't identify with, and don't recommend your OS of choice.
Just because you think Linux/Mac should be mentioned in glowing praise next to every mention of Vista doesn't make it so. The point of Consumer Reports is to review things, not advertise the competitors to those things.
Jesus, I wish people would do this for Steve Ballmer chair jokes... and pretty much any other joke that is funny the first few times but gets REALLY FUCKING OLD after more than that.
Maybe then we might see some funnies, rather than "CHUCK NORRISS STOPP TIEM"/"STEVE BALLMER FROW CHAYER"/"CAN I HASS SHIT JOEK NOW" all the friggin time.
This is pedantry 2 DA MAX, but Dr Who uses a police box (which have already been phased out) not a phone box.
The difference with Vista is that the KDE team really has some major interesting new technologies now, though most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.
So did Vista. And Leopard, for that matter.
As I see it:
KDE aims for a Windows-ish philosophy of "everything should be configurable". There are options for just about everything, so you can tweak your desktop to be just the way you want it. This can be intimidating for newbies, but then KDE can also be configured to be very newbie friendly, and indeed many distros already do configure it that way.
GNOME, on the other hand, aims for a Mac OS X philosophy of only presenting to the user what they really need to use to get the job done, with some options hidden and others nonexistant. This is designed to be easy for just about anyone to pick up easily (probably why the Ubuntu team chose it) but it absolutely sucks for configurability.
To summarise: KDE is for end users but can be for power users, GNOME is aimed specifically at end users and noone but.
My thoughts precisely. But hey, anything to have a go at Microsoft, right?
I know. And it doesn't have to be this way - my post was a general observation. But I find it hilarious to see Slashdotters using one of the biggest debasements and tragedies of our time as a method of having a pop at the Zune. It's OK, they say, the kids will strop. Bullshit.
What a nasty world we live in where a kid will go into a sulk because they only got a "wrongly" branded $100+ MP3 player on Christmas morning.
The point is that the shitty "women waving their arses around" format of music videos (especially dance ones, I've noticed) which is rehashed once about every 40 seconds is reused so often that I'm beginning to get bored of scantily clad women. Which is, as I'm sure you can agree, at least a double edged sword.
Sorta. After a quick google, seems like it's a corporate messaging thing, and since I use Microsoft Messenger (MS' pisspoor hybrid corporate/personal client for the Mac) it might have singled me out. Never know. :/
Yes, but the editors would rather like to keep Slashdot a purely metaphorical shitheap.
yeah I know you can use a gmail email as a passport.net (or whatever it is) account and use that with messenger,
;)
Not any more. Before I used msn@joe-baldwin.net or somesuch, but one day I got a message at sign in telling me I had to either get a Hotmail account or change my Passport to something under the messengeruser.com domain (e.g. joebaldwin@messengeruser.com is the one i picked).
I suppose it makes sense; it allows me to give out my MSN information in places that are obscenely public (like, oh, say, Slashdot) and not worry about 12 trillion spam messages.
Most of their customers probably already use gmail, so why continue offering the service?
At least among the technically inexperienced, Gmail usage isn't all that high in the UK. Even looking at my college IT class, most of whom were geeks of some description, it was mostly Hotmail or Yahoo.
Of course this is anecdotal evidence, but still...
It sets off my "Bush is an idiot and a terrible judge of character" alarm. Although that's been going off for at least 7 years now.
Maybe I should rephrase my original point. Bush is a disgusting, dictatorial, insane, imperialist cunt with frankly idiotic policies and barely enough sense to flip burgers for minimum wage.
Putin is more unforgivably terrible than that.
Bush may be a prick, but Putin makes him look like Jesus fucking Christ.
Seconded on the mice. MS mice are excellent, wouldn't use anything else.
That said, if the scroll ball didn't gum up after a few hours of casual use, I'd happily use Apple's new mouse again.
The rest of us just want to pay a fair price, which basically means premium price for new/popular stuff, and a lot less for everything else. You know, how the market works.
I'm sorry, was that your argument? Dear me, it appears to have died in a heap. Wow, Led Zeppelin for a fiver a pop. Boy am I angry that I got mine for seven quid a pop. Oh look, are those albums from less than a year ago? My god, I think they are!
And before you say: no, allofmp3's prices were not fair prices. Not in the slightest.
Well except for one small flaw (I know slashdot has a short attention span). This forum is always going on about the "new and improved" business model's triumph over the "old and busted" model. However I'm not seeing a corresponding rise in the uptake of this "new and improved" model, but simply more consumption of what the "old and busted" model has already produced regardless of the source.
That's by design. That's what the much-touted "new and improved" model means; the same stuff for no cost, because musicians and those who bankroll, market and support them shouldn't be paid for copies of their music. That's pretty much it.
I would probably have more respect for these people if they'd just admit they're being cheap. But as it is they wrap it in the flag and pretend they're either doing a service or it's the way of the future.
I find my card (Capital One Visa, i.e. "you have no credit history, here's one for you", with a £100 limit) to be quite handy. I can pay off the whole bill three times over each month without suffering too much, and if I'm REALLY desperate for cash I can handle the withdrawal fees (you pay for the convenience I suppose).
I would disagree with the part about not buying something if you can't pay it off; that only becomes a trap when you're intent on making the minimum payment rather than paying off as much of the balance as you can reasonably afford each month. If you do the latter, you'll be alright, and it's where credit cards come into their own (i.e. short term credit).
Now overdrafts on the other hand...
Yes, a lovely ideal except that a) musicians already can ignore the record companies and follow your business model if they so desire, but b) lots of them patently don't want to and c) the ones who do have mostly not become massively popular with "great musicians flourishing" as you put it; the ones that do get successful (Kate Nash and the Arctic Monkeys spring readily to mind) generally get that great success after signing with a record label.
This business model also doesn't work because it relies totally on the public's personal honesty and willingness to travel possibly hundreds of miles to visit a gig by a small band and buy merchandise, both of which are in doubt (especially the first). And even then, after putting on gigs etc, it's entirely possible that the band may never break even (guitars, amps, keyboards etc aren't free).
In fact, this whole problem, the fact that most music fans are not going to travel miles away to pay to see a gig to either see a band they like play their songs once or see a band they've never seen who might well be crap, is the sort of thing the sale of recorded music is intended to solve. Which you conveniently forget.
So yeah, lovely plan, except for the part where it's all bollocks and might well actually reduce the diversity of music on offer. Good try, though.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck when it comes to prosecuting even enough people for breaking your paid and bought for laws.
You mean standard copyright law, right? That was hardly bought and paid for (the extensions, maybe, but then I'll bet that the amount of piracy of recent music is huge.)
Radiohead is really the first band I know of that is trying something different in this space.
And like I mentioned, they may well only have made any money at all by virtue of the fact that they were already a huge band with legions of fans. If they were unknown, they might have barely broken even.
There is like 1 good song on average album and all the other songs are just filler crap.
I dunno. I like all my CDs (I have about 200), none of them have any filler. Maybe the typical Britney-lite album has that sure, but...
I bet that majority of those downloads were done for or by someone with an IQ of 75 or something like that!
That still means that someone thinks the music is good, or at least good enough. Not everyone is into Porcupine Tree, not everyone is into Britney, not everyone is into Swedish Nazi death metal, not everyone is into etc etc etc etc ad infinitum. The fact that you don't like Britney Spears doesn't mean that all those downloads somehow become worthless; they were still done, and most likely a large portion of them were done by someone looking to avoid paying for the album.
More to the point, the fact that almost every album is available for free via illegal means makes it impossible to base a value judgement about a particular album/artist in this context. All the people downloading the Britney album of my example could have downloaded Fear of a Blank Planet with roughly the same amount of expenditure and effort, but didn't.
Only you seem to be focusing on deriding the people who don't pay directly for their copies of music (according to our brief custom of the last 70 years).
I do focus on them, because by and large their lack of payment is based on pure selfishness rather than any overriding moral conscience. If anything, the lack of money going into the system may well stifle artist development; while MySpace, Peoplesound and other such music sharing sites may provide promotion, they cannot match the marketing or distribution clout of the labels. Small bands seeking fame or wishing to have their music heard by a wider audience than the few people who may happen upon their MySpace page may well fail in that goal if they end up with no practical assistance, assistance that labels (both independent and major) have a role in giving.
Why is it so hard to see that its ok to let companies with no practical business model die off?
The record labels HAVE a practical business model, which is funding and promoting artists and then collecting royalties on the records sold as payment. That lots of people selfishly choose to circumvent the payment bit of this model doesn't render it any less practical or feasible.
It seems particularly hard for people of the last couple generations to fathom that music (or art in general) can be created without being paid for copies of their work.
I can fathom that, but I consider it to be the artist's choice to release their work for free or not. If the artist chooses to sign with a record label, they've made it fairly clear that they wish to be paid for making their music. Moreover, there is plenty of music which is available for free, legally, with no commercial interference; and yet a huge part of these discussions on Slashdot is discussing precisely how people can and should carry on illegaly obtaining music produced, funded and sold by corporations they claim to despise and consider a relic.
Even if you don't want to or can't believe this old school view of art, you will face the reality of digital technology. Copying is only going to get faster and more convenient. Distributed technology will only get more robust. Controlling the location of 1s and 0s will become increasingly futile.
So everyone involved should just give up? They should just succumb to the cries of hordes of selfish downloaders, throw themselves to the mercy of the crowds and say "take it! take it all! We'll never be able to stop you! We'll go out of business to support your selfishness!" Bullshit.
Still, every time they yell thief I feel more like Robin Hood, and I'm not the only one.
Robin Hood didn't steal for his own personal gain. You're just being cheap by taking something that you would usually have to pay for.